Driving home from work last night, it hit me that one can still have three gate/trigger busses without resorting to overly expensive toggles or using slide switches - the SPDT ON-OFF-ON that I'd intended for two busses will happily serve three.

The way I am deriving the gates and triggers goes like this (should have a diagram, but what the heck):

As the design sits right now, each bus switch will send its bit to one of two busses. Lets say a bus switch is set to bus 1. The bus is ANDed with a slightly delayed version of the clock signal. When any stage assigned to the bus goes high, this produces a gate that's as long as the clock period. From that gate, a trigger is derived. So, if the step associated with the switch goes active (the LED for that stage lights up), we get a gate and a trigger on the Bus 1 gate and trigger outputs. As an aside, the ramifications of the gate being as long as the clock period provides the exquisite possibility of varying the gate period by clocking the Klee with a pulse width modulated VCO.

Anyway, if that switch is set to bus two, the same thing happens, except, well, it's on bus two. If the switch is in the center off position, the signal doesn't go to any bus, so it's like a 'rest' if you're triggering things from bus 1 and bus 2.

So, the idea is, why not NOR the two busses together to form a third bus? In a normal sequencer, which the Klee will certainly do by selecting only one active bit, this would have the effect of sending one gate/trigger out per clock pulse from one of the three busses, while the master gate and trigger will always send a gate and trigger out per clock pulse.

Putting in more than one active bit is what brings on the Klee factor. Now things get....interesting. With two busses and more than one active bit in the register, it's possible that Bus 1 and 2 can fire at the same time - it just depends on if the bits land on a stage selected for bus 1 and a stage selected for bus 2 simultaneously. Gating two different voices from these two busses will now create what I think will certainly be some really cool one or two simultaneously voiced sequences. Adding the third bus will get really interesting, but I'll have to diagram that to adequately describe what I think will happen. It is quite Klee in nature.

But, that's not the triphonic part, it just serves to enable the triphonic idea. I thought of it driving to work this morning.

A couple of years ago, Romeo turned me onto the Buchla S&H from the 266 SOU module. Without going into a lot of detail, the S&H takes a signal and pulse input and creates three sampled and held outputs. Two of the outputs alternate between samples, while the third output takes a sample with each pulse. Around that time I recorded an 8 step sequencer using the Buchla 266, and it was cool - notes would overlap, whereas on a normal sequencer, it is essentially good at creating monophonic lines. Can you see where I'm heading with this?

The three busses each put out a gate signal and a trigger signal. How about a third signal for each bus - a sampled and held voltage? In other words, bus 1 will sample and hold the Klee voltage every time it is triggered, bus 2 and bus 3 will do the same. This means that three voices can overlap, and when arranged spatially, I would think it would be a stunning effect. Kind of along the same lines as an analog shift register, but with a different function. The fourth output, the normal Klee voltage, would certainly add another line to it, and the master gate and trigger would drive anything continually with each clock pulse (like the percussive sound in sample 11).

Front-panel-wise it would mean three extra connectors. Circuit-wise, it wouldn't be too awfully difficult, either. I'm thinking LM398s, my old standby. A FET based S&H would probably work as well.

4016 might work - certainly would decrease the parts/cost of the thing.
I just wanna be sure there is as little droop as possible.

The drive home inspired the last (I promise) bit of feature creep for the Model 2 (the rest of the creep can go to more expansive/larger models).

OK, bus 3, you know, the one NORed out of busses 1 and 2. If one were to put a rotary selector in, one could add a higher level of variation. IE, why limit oneself to NOR? What about AND, XOR, OR and all of those other cool Boolean functions? Instead of calling it bus 3, it could be called the logic bus.

Now bear with me, this is not idle feature creepery here. The original Klee function really kicked butt. When I added a trigger/gate bus, it just blew up in my face.

The Klee function is meant as a source of inspiration. It's like looking at cloud and seeing, instead of a cloud, a face or a horse or a demon. Or a pretty pink unicorn with yellow spots prancing around in daisies with a wood nymph astride its back and.....well, you get the picture.

The point is, the 'normal' sequencer is often, not all the time mind you, used to realize a musical line that one dreams up. The Klee on the other hand tosses you an unexpected turn with every flip of the switch or turn of a knob. To a great extent, it's almost as if its simple CMOS mind dreams up the sequence. Flipping a single register switch can transform a sequence totally. Selecting which bit fires a gate or a trigger, or merging the gates and triggers supplies more often than not gratifying variations on a found sequence. The ear hears the pattern and the brain discerns the music within, much like the brain forms the face out of the fluffy cloud that the eye can see. That sample 11 literally appeared out of thin air - the Klee started playing it after I deselected a bit from a previous pattern; I more or less hit the record button and pressed a few keys on my keyboard. I've spent entire evenings playing things that just flowed together seamlessly, stuff I wish I had recorded. In fact, its most annoying aspect is that it literally provides too much good material - I have to keep away from the recorder to stem the flood of samples I'd record.

I'm not suggesting the Klee writes the music, but rather it provides ideas and very often a good foundation that can be elaborated on.

As I mentioned before, a sequence becomes more varied, and often more or less interesting, depending on where in the sequence and how many gates and pulses controlling the EGs are selected, and whether they are merged or not. A boolean function that puts even more variation to this aspect of the sequence would seriously be over the top. A flip of the rotary would again transform the sequence, and provide a great degree of variation on a found sequence without changing its basic structure to the degree the selection or de-selection of a shift register bit will. Like the found sequences, it's not something you sit down and plan out, it's something that's going to happen when it happens, when you flip that switch.

As for using the Klee to control drum modules, it would certainly push that into new realms of possibility as well.

Well, it's something to try, anyway.

As far as the original random input goes, I'm almost to the point that I wonder if it's worth the panel space. It's but one stone among many shining gems.

Or a pretty pink unicorn with yellow spots prancing around in daisies with a wood nymph astride its back and....

if Thomas Henry ever writes another book can you be in collaboration

Nice to see that the simple brilliance of the Klee is beginning to shine.When you first breadboarded it, i thought it was almost a a side dish for you.
Strange that in the annals of synth history,such a creative tool was not common amongst the fray.There were diy articles but they were generally complex and the Triadex Muse wasn't cheap and was insular.The source of uncertainty was obscure and expensive.

Robert - yes, I'd say this is more along the lines of the Muse, and the random function would be along the lines of the quantized random voltage function of the SOU.

I'm going to do a basic Model 2 with just the two busses without the logic bus or S&H. I'll then do a Model 3 Triphonic version.

Question: The way I'm deriving the triggers and the gates actually puts the output trigger 20 uSec *behind* the output gate. My EGs process this just fine, but I wonder if there are EGs out there that wouldn't like this situation. 20 us isn't a lot of time, but I'd hate to have someone build one and find out it makes their EG wonky. I can arrange the outputs so they're simultaneous, but that's a few extra parts, and I'd like to avoid it if it's not necessary. So - anybody out there know of any issue with this?

I'm not suggesting the Klee writes the music, but rather it provides ideas and very often a good foundation that can be elaborated on.

Holger Czukay once wrote about a track he had co-written with David Sylvian where Sylvian took out the bass at the last mixdown which Czukay had laid down at the start. Czukay mentioned that this was a good way to approach the track, because although the bass was not present it had contributed by providing the emotional influence to sculpt the track from the onset.

I suppose when the 'random button' is pressed, who knows what will happen next- but sometimes these things gel, and I too have lost many great moments like this in the past. The problem though with this kind of approach is the stuff I have recorded usually fits on an entire MiniDisc and listen back can be a complete chore.

I suppose if you quantised the outs of the cmos in a musical way, you could have a more predictable sequence to use, problem is again this could make it too predictable, unless of course the were more than one shift register (psuedo random generator) each with a predetermined quantised scale to read from.

Does that make any sense?

As for the trigger lag Scott, could this be adjusted with a trimmer or switch of any sort so any person who has a problem can adjust the trigger lag? In fact if they were really paranoid, they could bring it out to the front panel

I used to do that alot.
I'd have an initial midi track which was literally random notes and rests.
This would be the seed for say 2 other tracks, a kick/snare rhythm and a bassline.
Then I'd mute the first track and fit something to it's offspring.
I'd often mute the original drum and bass offspring (or re-write them) as well. It was a good way of evolving an idea out of nothing. Sometimes it would end up just being an exercise is composition, sometimes it would evolve into a great track._________________What makes a space ours, is what we put there, and what we do there.

The thought occurs to me that my concern over 20 us of difference between gate and trigger is a bit foolish. After getting some much needed sleep, I realized that most EGs are retriggerable - the trigger is independent of the gate. If you have an EG gated, then trigger it, it still reacts to the trigger. The human brain has no way of knowing that something happened .02 ms after something else did.

This day's chapter deals with the 'Merge' function I mention every now and then. Its function is to merge the gates of adjacent selected bits into one big gate instead of individual discrete gates. It also eliminates the accompanying discrete triggers - it produces one trigger for the gigantor gate.

This function is intended to be able to create notes of varying lengths in a sequence. Another method would be to clock the Klee with a pulse width modulated VCO (the gate will be as wide as the clocking pulse). In this instance, the gates will be of varying length, but the triggers and gates will occur in unaltered numbers.

I've attached a couple of illustrations of the merge function. They illustrate the row of bus switches in varying up (bus 1 selected), down (bus 2 selected) and middle (no bus selected) positions. Below that is the clock signal, and below that are the gate and trigger outputs of each bus.

The examples illustrate the simplest use - using only one active bit in the register. Once more than one bit goes active - Klee function as opposed to 'normal' sequencer function - it gets quite varied. I'd have to produce 64K drawings to illustrate all of the permutations .

I drug the recorder downstairs to record a sample illustrating the switch bus and merge function. Of course, at this writing, I only have *one* bus wired up.

00:00 - 00:09
The sample starts out with one stage selected for bus 1. I have bus one set to load the shift register when it goes high. In this instance, the first stage encountered is high, so the bus reloads with every clock pulse - IE, the same note repeats. At 00:09 I flip the reload function off, and the sequence proceeds. Merge function is on, so the gates are merged together, and there is one trigger for each merged gate. Voice is the filter processed by the WM.

00:38
I flip another stage onto the bus, increasing the number of notes firing the EG. Bus is still merged. I mix in the VCO, at first pitched for a much lower note.

00:50
I turn the merge function off. Now the merged gates separate into separate gates, each with a trigger. This produces more discrete notes.

As this section proceeds, I mix in another voice that is fired by the 'master' gate and trigger outputs, which are constantly triggered/gated. This is the same patch as illustrated earlier in this thread, so I can change the pitch of the VCO with the keyboard. In this section I hit a couple of keys on the keyboard, and the altered pitch follows the Klee voltage, producing a few higher notes every now and then.

02:15
The second stage is flipped off the bus, so the pattern changes to fewer notes.

02:26
The same stage is flipped back onto the bus, returning the original pattern, and the sample fades.

This weekend I hope to finish the bus and get things on schematic. I've got a schemo of the bus, but it's all M2L using CD40106s - I think if I throw in some CD4093 NANDs, it'll be less part-filled and easier to grok.

Wikipedia used to be a great source of good info, but because it is so open source-based anyone can now print any crap that they see fit. A classic case of this is WallMart who actively spend time correcting all the negative stuff thousands of people try to write about them.

I found no entry in the Oxford English dictionary (well Chambers dictionary) for the word drug used in that context. "I dragged"- yes. "I drug"?, no.

Possibly "drug" could have been used in old english- like 'trash' which used to be used until 'rubbish' replaced it

"I'm on drugs"- yes that can be used, but it is used in an entirely different context

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